Deeplinks

The Internet has been on fire in recent months over two court decisions that threaten to criminalize password sharing. The law at the heart of the cases is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 statute meant to outlaw computer break-ins. Congress passed the CFAA after "War Games"—a techno-thriller film about a teen whose computer shenanigans nearly sparked World War III—put the fear of God into lawmakers about the vulnerability of our computer networks. The law—passed years before the advent of the modern Internet—is seriously showing its age.

Making Safe Harbors Expire Is Dangerous and Unnecessary

Under a new rule from the Copyright Office, website owners could be exposed to massive risk of copyright liability simply for neglecting to submit an online form on time. The rule could eliminate the safe harbor status that thousands of websites receive under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Current law (17 U.S.C. § 512, which was enacted as part of the DMCA) protects the owners of websites and online services from monetary liability based on the allegedly infringing activities of their users or other third parties. Owners must meet many requirements in order to be eligible for that protection, including participating in the notice-and-takedown procedure for allegedly infringing content.

You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free.

But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies have joined forces with local police to deploy automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology at gun shows, with the aim of collecting attendees' plate information—without an explicit target. Gun show patrons are typically concerned about their Second Amendment rights, but what about the First Amendment?

Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.

In this case, a teenager known in court documents as Ricardo P. admitted to two cases of burglary. One condition of his parole was that he submit his phone to search at any time, whether by his probation officers or any peace officer, even though his phone use had nothing to do with the commission of the crimes.

Should prosecutors have the ability to take advantage of unclear laws to bring charges for behavior far beyond the problem Congress was trying to address? We don’t think so. When not carefully limited, criminal laws give prosecutors too much power to go after innocent individuals for innocuous behavior, like violating a website's terms of use by using a partner’s password to post something for them or print out a boarding pass. And that’s terrifying. It’s also contrary to a long-held constitutional rule requiring vague criminal statutes to be interpreted narrowly—called the Rule of Lenity—intended to ensure that people have clear and unambiguous notice in the letter of the law itself of what behavior could land them in prison.

Are you scrambling for a clever Halloween costume this weekend? We've got you covered. Here are five ideas for digital rights activists planning to trick-or-treat on Monday.

Facial Recognition Face Paint

Just this week we learned that facial recognition is far more prevalent among local and federal law enforcement than we thought, with at least 26 states using this biometric technology. Of those, 16 states grant the FBI access to their DMV databases. Many large cities have proposed using facial recognition on live camera feeds.